Coal mine blasting, BLM lands, northern Arizona. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Exactly 50 years ago lauded University of Montana professor and historian K. Ross Toole published The Rape of the Great Plains — Northwest America, Cattle and Coal. As he wrote: “A pitched battle is being fought over the fate of 250,000 square miles of unspoiled wilderness in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. In pursuit of “Project Independence” (American energy self sufficiency), powerful coal-mining and utility interests are preparing to strip mine the Northern Great Plains into a desert; impassioned citizens of these states are fighting back. The outcome will have crucial implications for the entire American landscape. The issues are many and complex, and have long been obfuscated by the ‘developers’.”
If that sounds eerily familiar to the current desecration and rape of the West, there are very good reasons for that perception. The Trump administration is on a non-sensical anti-environmental crusade across every acre of undeveloped land left — and the West contains most of what remains undeveloped, putting Montana, once again, squarely in the crosshairs of the raper scrapers.
One need not look too hard to see what we’re facing. You can start with the “drill, baby, drill” mantra that is supposed to make us “energy independent.” But wait, isn’t that what was promised when Toole wrote a half century ago? Sure it is. Only back then their goal for Montana was to turn it into “the boiler room for the nation” by strip mining and burning massive amounts of coal.
Of course Montana could never be the “boiler room for the nation” because we are far from the highly populated areas that consume the most energy. That inconvenient fact aside, the simple truth is that they ran Colstrip for 50 years, creating one of the largest sources of atmospheric pollution in the nation, and leaving behind a legacy of polluted groundwater from the coal ash settling ponds.
The far greater consequence of their “vision” is the ongoing and worsening climate crisis that has plunged the West into extreme drought bringing snowless winters, baking summers, drying rivers, and dead trout. Although the original developers have long been gone, the results of their perfidy live on.
Now, with a complicit Congress, they’re getting on with raping what’s left.
+ $700 million taxpayer dollars have now been promised to “save coal” while solar and wind projects are cancelled and defunded.
+ The “roadless rule” that saved 58 million undeveloped acres is gutted by executive order — and companion legislation.
+ The Wilderness Study Areas presciently designated by Montana’s famed Senator Lee Metcalf the same year Toole wrote his book, are under attack to be opened to multiple abuse by Montana’s retiring Sen. Steve Daines … one last insult on his way out the door.
+ The mis-named Forest Service continues to decimate our national forests by logging, burning, and road-building under the false premise of preventing wildfires … which are now driven by climate change, not “overgrown forests.”
+ Yet another huge gold mine is being proposed on the Blackfoot River, which is still recovering from the massive poisoning from a former mine’s failed tailings dam.
The list goes on and on, with far too many examples for one short column. But make no mistake, the damage will be around long after the politicians and their corporate “partners” are dead and gone.
In effect, what’s happening right now amounts to stealing any options that future generations may have about what to take and what to leave for the generations that follow them. Instead, they will face cleaning up what will be trashed, degraded, and ruined — thanks to the new Rape of the West.
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